Can the 2011 Minnesota Legislature close a massive budget gap and redraw the state's political district boundaries at the same time? Maybe. But if next year's legislators are the same species of mortals Minnesotans have been sending to St. Paul for the past 152 years, we'd rather they don't try.

If the new Legislature acts promptly next January or early February, it can delegate a major part of the responsibility for redistricting to a nonpartisan commission of retired judges, and still reserve for itself the final yes or no on new district lines.

That change in redistricting procedure is the recommendation of some of Minnesota's most respected political elders of both parties -- former Vice President Walter Mondale, former governors Al Quie and Arne Carlson, former Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe, former Secretary of State Joan Growe, and former Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz.

They are among the thinkers who came together in 2007-08 under the auspices of Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Humphrey Institute to propose a remedy for what ails American redistricting when done the customary way. The usual actors are legislators, who are constitutionally empowered to choose their own boundaries, or sitting judges, acting close to deadline because legislators have botched the job.

The consequences of redistricting-as-usual haven't been good for American democracy. That was the testimony of Norman Ornstein, the Minnesota-bred congressional scholar and commentator who kicked off a Humphrey Institute conference on redistricting Monday. When politicians choose their own voters, they tend to opt for political safety, he explained. The result too often has been an increasing share of politically safe seats, occupied by politicians more beholden to extreme factions within their own parties than to their constituencies as a whole.

Minnesota has largely been spared that ill result because judges, not lawmakers, finished the job for a deadlocked Legislature and governor in 1972, 1982 and 2002. (In 1991, the Legislature drew the lines, and Gov. Carlson's attempt to veto them failed on a technicality. A subsequent court review upheld the DFL-drawn map.) In 2011, the Legislature ought to cede this task to jurists in the early going.

A bill that won state Senate approval in 2009, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, would allow each of the four legislative caucuses to appoint one retired judge and would direct those judges to appoint a fifth one. They would get to work by mid-March 2011 and deliver proposed new legislative and congressional maps to the Legislature by April 30. The Legislature could approve or reject the plan, but could not modify it. The bill spelled out a timetable for taking the plan back to the commission for amendments, should it be rejected on the first several iterations.

If no agreement is reached after three tries, the courts would inevitably take charge. Time would be wasting; Minnesota's deadline for completing a plan is Feb. 21, 2012. But given the state's redistricting history, getting judges involved earlier would seem to increase chances that new maps would be in place well before that deadline.

Pogemiller's bill won Senate approval with five Republican votes and had considerable GOP interest in the House. It ought to be revived next January, with DFL House members joining in giving the measure serious consideration. Redistricting can be an irresistible distraction for lawmakers, one that "mucks up the Legislature's business for more than a year," in the words of former Senate leader Moe. Next year's lawmakers have more than enough work on their agendas without becoming mapmakers, too.